[gentoo-user] [OT emacs-vcs/gnus] movemail failure (on permissions)

[gentoo-user] [OT emacs-vcs/gnus] movemail failure (on permissions)

[Harry Putnam]

Hopefully some emacs/gnus adept will have some idea what's going here.

I've hit a snag after deciding to use the gentoo approach to acquiring
and tracking a fast moving emacs from bzr sources.

I've emerged emacs-vcs and a few required pkgs.

After adjusting my emacs init files to suit the new arrangement, when I
fire up gnus; I hit failure of `movemail' soon as it tries to check and
pull mail.

(From *Messages* buffer)
,----
| Reading incoming mail from directory...
| Processing mail from ~/.emacs-mail-crash-box...
| Reading incoming mail from file...
| movemail: Permission denied for /var/spool/mail/harry (1 return).  Continue? (y or n) n
| Mail source (file :path /var/spool/mail/harry) error (Permission denied for /var/spool/mail/harry).  Continue? (y or n) n
| Mail source (file :path /var/spool/mail/harry) failed: (error Cannot get new mail)
| nnml: Reading incoming mail (no new mail)...done
`----

Something in those permisssions is set wrong:

ls -ld /var/spool/mail
   drwxr-xr-x 2 mail root 4096 Dec 19 13:30 /var/spool/mail

ls -l /var/spool/mail
  total 4
-rw------- 1 harry nfsu 676 Dec 19 13:30 harry

ls -l /usr/libexec/emacs/25.0.50/i686-pc-linux-gnu/
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  9552 Dec 19 16:19 hexl
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 22016 Dec 19 16:19 movemail
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  5412 Dec 19 16:19 profile
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21067 Dec 19 16:19 rcs2log
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  9636 Dec 19 16:19 update-game-score

-------       -------       ---=---       -------       -------

On other Linux OSs I vaguely recall something about movemail being
setuid or setgid or maybe both.... perhaps that is the problem.

I tried both but the error didn't change